Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group‐level processes such as subgroup formation and fission–fusion dynamics. Although critical to animal sociality, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing coh...

Creel et al . argue against the conservation effectiveness of fencing based on a population measure that ignores the importance of top predators to ecosystem processes. Their statistical analyses consider, first, only a subset of fenced reserves and, second, an incomplete examination of ‘costs per lion.’ Our original conclusions remain unaltered.

Conservationists often advocate for landscape approaches to wildlife management while others argue for physical separation between protected species and human communities, but direct empirical comparisons of these alternatives are scarce. We relate African lion population densities and population trends to contrasting management practices across 42 sites in 11 countries. Lion populations in fenced reserves are significantly cl...